Forging volumetric methods

Information Needs: Developing Personas of Humanities Scholars

This article looks at methodological issues arising from collecting data from policy makers. Interview episodes highlight how the processes of role-ascription and the negotiation of competences between the interviewee and the interviewer can be meaningful in terms of the analysis of ‘elite interviews’. In the interviews, the interactions reveal how the informant makes sense of the relation between research, knowledge and policy-making. In illustrating how the informant presents himself/herself as policy-maker and ascribes the role of the researcher, the data condense the efforts to bridge different cognitive worlds on both sides and help us understand the working of the institutional-organizational context within which the informant is embedded. This negotiation may be very complex indeed if the informant wishes to maintain a positioning as a researcher as well as a policy-maker, something that is increasingly common as evidence-informed policy-making brings research and policy into closer relationship. The article draws on the experiences of interviewing and data collection for the KnowandPol project, with attention to the politics of the specific context of Hungary. It concludes that context is highly significant in both negotiating and making sense of interviews with policy-makers. It highlights the specific circumstances of enquiry in post-Socialist regimes, where uncertainty about role and status is present on both sides. With the scientization of policy-making, policy-makers as commissioners of various analyses tend to understand themselves as competent readers of social sciences who are also conversant with social science discourse. This also shapes their expectations towards the interview situation and the way they want to present themselves.

Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

This research paper explores the application of a unique field survey approach designed to deal with site detection and interpretation in karst fields.The method has its limitations, and it is predominantly focused on detecting sites from antiquity because of the nature of the material remains left in the landscape from those times.Nevertheless, the approach provides a new layer of spatial information based on objectivity in contrast to the usual practices of archaeological reconnaissance.The general goals of the wider AdriaRom Project are described and the role of this particular case study in the wider survey within the scope of the project.Finally, the results of the field survey are presented and the efficiency and the drawbacks of the utilized methodology are discussed.

Methodology and Archaeometry (MetArh) is an annual scientific conference organized since 2013 by the Department of Archaeology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb, and the Croatian Archaeological Society.The goal of the conference is to entice interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, new insights and approaches as well as new theoretical frameworks in contemporary archaeological science. It offers a wider perspective in observing methodology and methodological practices, also challenging traditional approaches in archaeological research, and following the creative adaptation of methods from other disciplines into archaeology. Also, it enables scholars to present their work, engage in discussion and motivate young scholars and archaeology students to pursue contemporary topics and present their research.This edition of the conference Proceedings contains twelve papers from the 8th and 9th MetArh conference which was held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. The 8th MetArh conference was held from 3rd – 4th of December 2020, and the 9th from 2nd – 3rd of December 2021 (https://metarh.ffzg.unizg.hr/).Due to COVID-19, both conferences were held on the online platform Hopin.to. It was very challenging to organize and realize the conference in a virtual format but, most importantly, it produced high-quality works some of which are published in this publication. Papers in this volume are focused on different aspects of archaeological methodology and archaeometry, including case studies from Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia and Ukraine.

Methodology and Archaeometry (MetArh) is an annual scientific conference organized since 2013 by the Department of Archaeology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb, and the Croatian Archaeological Society.The goal of the conference is to entice interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, new insights and approaches as well as new theoretical frameworks in contemporary archaeological science. It offers a wider perspective in observing methodology and methodological practices, also challenging traditional approaches in archaeological research, and following the creative adaptation of methods from other disciplines into archaeology. Also, it enables scholars to present their work, engage in discussion and motivate young scholars and archaeology students to pursue contemporary topics and present their research.This edition of the conference Proceedings contains twelve papers from the 8th and 9th MetArh conference which was held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. The 8th MetArh conference was held from 3rd – 4th of December 2020, and the 9th from 2nd – 3rd of December 2021 (https://metarh.ffzg.unizg.hr/).Due to COVID-19, both conferences were held on the online platform Hopin.to. It was very challenging to organize and realize the conference in a virtual format but, most importantly, it produced high-quality works some of which are published in this publication. Papers in this volume are focused on different aspects of archaeological methodology and archaeometry, including case studies from Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia and Ukraine.

The digital information environment has ensured that the twenty first century will be a global watershed, like that of the fifteenth century in the Western world, for changes in the creation, distribution and access of knowledge and information.. Changes however are not being reflected in the formal frameworks of scholarly publishing. In the digital information environment, the challenges will be significant ranging from information overload to a multimedia non-linear access to information. Developments in the public and private web reflect the tensions of initiatives and consequent challenges, such as currently being experienced between the increasing aggregation of multinational publishers on the one hand and Open Access Initiatives on the other. Globally ‘publish or perish’ pressures have increased on researchers with the need for publication becoming the pathway to success in research assessment exercises, leading to tenure and promotion. The book and the article are no longer intrinsically a means of distributing knowledge. Depending on one’s viewpoint of the “Faustian bargain” between authors and publishers, the scholarly publishing environment has been in crisis for a number of years. While this has been particularly reflected in the debates on serials, many humanities scholars have experienced declining sales of their monographs and a lack of appropriate outlets for their research publications. While many traditional university presses have been closing down or losing money for a number of years, new models are emerging with different philosophies and capitalizing on new electronic settings. User studies have indicated that Print on Demand (POD) is universally seen as an essential requirement of output. in those contexts Open Archives Initiatives have seen the creation of a number of E-Print repositories which in turn have organically led to the establishment of E-Presses. Future scholarly publishing patterns will be much influenced by author attitudes at the creation level. Major programs of scholarly advocacy in the context of scholarly communication processes will, however, need to be implemented if scholarly authors, their institutions and their research output are to benefit from the new digital frameworks.

Alterations in self-experience are increasingly attended to as relevant and important aspects of schizophrenia, and psychosis more broadly, through a burgeoning self-disorders (SD) literature. At the same time, issues of self, subject, and subjectivity within schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses have also gained attention from researchers across the social sciences and humanities, and from ethnographic research especially. This paper examines the subjective experience of disruptions in self-identity within a cohort of first episode psychosis (FEP) service users, critically engaging with the SD literature and bringing it into conversation with social sciences and humanities scholarship on self and schizophrenia. Drawing findings from an ongoing ethnographic study of young peoples' experiences with psychosis, we explore meanings of mental distress relating to psychotic episodes and attend to issues of self, identity, and subjectivity. We critique the division between "normal" and "pathological" self-experience that is endorsed within the SD literature, arguing against the notion that fragmentation of self-experience in schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses is indicative of psychopathology. We highlight how experiences categorized as psychosis are also important and complete aspects of one's social world and inner life and explore the ways in which at least some aspects of disruptions of self-identity stem from clinical situations themselves-in particular, from asymmetries of power within the mental health system. Relating our findings to feminist, postcolonial, and disability studies' approaches to the "self," we emphasize the complex interplay between interpersonal, cultural, and structural aspects of self-experience within FEP.

The geological concept ‘the Anthropocene’ circulates widely outside Earth System Science – in museum communities, public culture, social sciences, and amongst social science and humanities scholars, artists, activists and public historians too. It is an evident idea for public historians today working with environmental history to engage with a concept that successfully and popularly bridges academic and public interests. This article discusses the concept of the Anthropocene within public environmental history’s historiography and brings in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential discussions from the academic field of history and theory about the non-synchronous temporalities geological time and historical time. The article categorizes public environmental history’s methodological approaches since the field emerged in the 1990s, revealing the important concepts being landscapes, human-nature interactions, climate change, sustainability and the Anthropocene. It concludes that the Anthropocene is a concept that can further develop public environmental history but that it also a paradox to the field potentially affecting a core idea in public history – relationships to publics. This has to do with temporal implications of the concept: it squeezes the temporality of memory important to public history and humans out of view; it imposes an extremely slow and long chronological time that is unfamiliar if not foreign to ordinary people to perceive of; it carries with it the idea about a future without humans and other species of today.

The emergence since the 1970s of social scientific and humanistic studies of law that orient to its linguistic, discursive, and textual features has added both empirical and critical theoretical perspectives to a study of legal language that diverges dramatically from what once was the domain of technicians of legal text and rhetoric. Resonant with the “linguistic turn” of the social sciences and the “sociocultural turn” of humanities, researchers with backgrounds in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, semiotics, and literature, among others, have converged around the structure and use of language and discourse in the expression and operation of the law. The earliest work in this area focused on the face-to-face interactions that constitute the legal process, including witness examination, judge-lawyer or judge-litigant exchanges, plea barging discourses, and even juror deliberation and lawyer-client interactions that happen out of public view. Much of it was conducted by social scientists and legal scholars taking seriously the main thesis of American legal realism, that law must be understood in the details of its actual processes, discursive or otherwise, and not just through the interpretive logics and internal histories of its legislative and judicial texts. More recently however, law and humanities scholars, as well as some social scientists, have returned to the language of legal texts, analyzing how their content is informed by narrative tropes from their sociocultural surround, but likewise by their materiality and mediation as documents, records, and files, of which the circulation between social actors figure importantly in law’s making. While their different disciplinary commitments result in different positions on a variety of methodological concerns—i.e., the need for empirical data to support their claims, the possibility and necessity of posing larger critical and/or normative interventions, and/or the value of offering policy reform recommendations, among others—most of these studies nonetheless concur on a basic vision of language use as a medium not only for reference to, but fundamentally for construction of social realities and orders. Legal language is thus understood as a central mode for the exercise of social power through law, and, increasingly, a focus of inquiry that figures centrally in sociolegal studies that considers how law is always a hermeneutic and empirical phenomenon. What counts as legal language scholarship is necessarily broadly scoped, ever widening, and susceptible to varied opinions about how to delimit it. Legal language scholarship is taken here to be all analyses of law—from both the social sciences and the humanities—that suggest a commitment to understanding law’s discursive and textual dimensions and their impact in shaping law’s force in the world. In the following sections, provided first is a list of texts that offers an overview of law and language scholarship, then a section listing Journals dedicated to sociolinguistic, semiotic, and interpretive approaches to law. The article then presents organized additional key scholarship, according to its origins in social scientific or humanities disciplines, with subheadings in each of these sections as relevant to important themes in the law and language literature.

Geneticists, biologists, social scientists, and humanist scholars have powerfully critiqued race as a stable set of biological categories. Despite this, in everyday life, race is consistently assumed to be visually available in physical features. Racial categories also continue to be used in scientific and social scientific research as if they were self-evident and real. In this study, I examine the role of visual perception in the construction of racial categories and their recalcitrance in everyday thought and interaction. My observations are based on in-depth interviews with 25 blind people, which highlight the unique features of their nonvisual, non-appearance-based experiences of race.

The Indian literati's perceptions of modern Europe have been the outcome of India's colonial experience, the cultural encounter with the West and a selective admiration of Europe. Perception management is 'a legitimate priority' for sovereign governments, while uncovering reality is a prime concern for social scientists. This chapter presents significance and relevance to European Union policymakers as it provides the comprehensive and detailed overview about the perceptions of the EU in India undertaken so far, by tapping information from three sources, namely, the press, 'elite' interviews and a public opinion survey. The Indian print media play a crucial role in ensuring vibrant Indian polity, and are acknowledged as the fourth pillar of democracy. The chapter elicits the opinion of the national policymakers and decision-makers about the EU in general and India-EU relations in particular. The public opinion survey was complemented by a content analysis of selected newspapers and elite interviews, in order to facilitate a better understanding of India-EU relations.

Feeling skeptical: Worry, dread, and support for environmental policy among climate change skeptics

Scholars working in the multidisciplinary field of book history pose diverse research questions, work with numerous sources of data and information, and employ a variety of analytical methods and tools. Geographic questions have been considered by book historians, notably since the groundbreaking work of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in the 1950s. Geographic information systems (GIS) technology, which was developed in Canada in the 1960s, was initially devised to support new methods of analysis and visualization in the physical and life sciences relating to spatial conditions, patterns, trends, and projections. Since the late 1990s, social scientists have used GIS increasingly, and, since the early 21st century, humanities scholars have also begun to use GIS as a result of digital and spatial turns within their fields. The application of GIS as an analytical method to investigate research questions in book history, first suggested in 1997, is now employed across a range of scholarly endeavors. Examples from the sciences that illustrate the required data structures, as well as the scope and analytical power of GIS, illuminate the development of geographies of the book. Such examples also illustrate the types of questions for which GIS is appropriate for advancing knowledge. Limited training for book historians in the application of GIS, along with the complexities of the technology, have resulted in the need for partnerships with quantitative researchers. These collaborations are increasing understanding of the spatial dimensions of book and print history. In addition, new programs of study in digital humanities, and initiatives of innovative scholarly societies, are helping to forge a generation of technologically trained scholars to propel the field of book history further.

“The Anthropocene” was a scientific neologism in 2000 but is now something of a buzzword in the Earth and environmental sciences, with the prospect of becoming part of the lingua franca of the social sciences and humanities too. It is closely related to the younger scientific neologism “planetary boundaries.” Both terms describe human impacts on the face of the Earth that are wider and deeper than previously recognized. Both also have an epochal meaning, suggesting as they do the end of the Holocene epoch (the period of Earth history during which Homo sapiens have flourished). This entry details the origins of the Anthropocene concept, and its collateral term, planetary boundaries. It then discusses antecedent concepts that failed to catch on in the world of science or the wider world. Contemporary attempts to formally designate the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch are then considered. Despite being so far inconclusive, these attempts have not prevented the Anthropocene being visible in the broader environmental sciences courtesy of the planetary boundaries hypothesis. The entry considers how social scientists and humanities scholars are responding to the claim that humanity is leaving its “safe operating space,” concluding with a discussion of how the broader academic discussions of the Anthropocene are being registered in geography. Though so far fairly marginal to debates about both ideas, geographers have a clear stake in determining the future significance of these concepts for science and society.